


TBD

by EG17



Category: Scrubs, X-Men (Movies)
Genre: Charles POV, Cherik - Freeform, Doctors, Doctors AU, Dr. Cox, Dr. Kelso, Hospital, J.D. - Freeform, Love/Hate, M/M, POV Charles, Scrubs - Freeform, Scrubs!Charles, hospital au, scrubs au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-24
Updated: 2014-08-27
Packaged: 2018-02-10 07:05:49
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 9,154
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2015655
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EG17/pseuds/EG17
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Charles Xavier has always planned on being a doctor, but when his father dies many years too soon the pressure to succeed heightens. After surviving many long years of schooling and graduating from Oxford, Charles and his best friend Raven both end up at Westchester Hospital for their internship, well-prepared and eager to follow the designated steps to become residents and then doctors, as expected.</p><p>What he doesn't expect is to wind up under tight scrutiny of the chief of medicine due to his father's prestige and his history at Oxford, or to accidentally find a mentor in that bastard Dr. Lehnsherr (who is way too easy to hate and all the more easy to love, much to Charles' dismay), or that he might just spark World War Three due to The Janitor's inexplicable enmity toward him.</p><p>Or that he'd ever be tempted to steal crazy pills from the mental ward to curb potential insanity.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Sorry I'm god-awful at summaries but in case you haven't caught on yet this is a Scrubs AU because I'm obsessed with X-Men and with Scrubs and I've never written an AU really so here's a first try (it is a try so it might be awful).  
> Another disclaimer is that yes, I've altered their characters a bit, but that's because I want them to fit the universe, not necessarily because I want the universe to fit them. Charles is, in fact, J.D., and while they can be different I think they both share a big heart and going off in their own head thing, so while Charles may be a bit more facetious in this fic I don't think he's changed that much.  
> And yes, Erik is Dr. Cox, and while in this fic he's more loquacious than he is in the movies, Dr. Cox and Erik share the same bitter facade and the big heart behind it all. So while they're a bit different, their essences are the same.  
> Also, I haven't picked a title yet.  
> Enjoy!

First days are always the most terrifying, no matter how many times you’ve endured them. As I trudge up the stairs on my way to my first day as an intern in an American hospital, I find myself so nervous I’ve got to distract myself with something else or my legs might give out from anxiety, and it would be a terrible first impression to wind up in the hospital not as an intern but as a patient.

                My mind wanders and I’m thinking about my first day of Oxford. At least then I was much more in my element. I’d gotten more compliments on my college polo shirt than I had on any other day of my life, and that was the outfit Raven said that gave people the impression that I was gay.

                Boy, is she in for a surprise.

                But this is something very different and between my accent, my British mannerisms, and my unorthodox upbringing, I knew it’d be difficult to fit in and as the snob I am I overcompensated for this by studying way too hard.

                I didn’t realize I’d get written off as arrogant almost immediately, which alienated me even more.

                I remind myself that I’d already attended a week long orientation a couple weeks ago which eased my worries a bit, knowing the flow of the hospital, the way it ticks and moves. I guess I’d already made a bit of a first impression, though mainly everyone just murmured in corroboration and kept to themselves out of apprehension.

                But while my long years of medical school and a week of orientation had ostensibly prepared me adequately for my internship, nothing had prepared me for being a doctor, and as I learn quickly, experience is the best teacher.

                Except, don’t tell that to head Doctor Shaw. He likes to think he’s the best teacher. But don’t mention that either around Doctor Lehnsherr. He’s certain he’s the best teacher but he seems reluctant about being one, a conflicted character trait I notice early on, to be perpetuated later.

                We’d learned about rounds plenty of times, but every doctor addresses them differently. I didn’t realize we’d dive into them right away on the first day, but here we are, huddled anxiously around a sleeping patient, emulating soldiers rapt with attention more than medical interns racking their brains for possible diagnosis.  

                The two men who’d introduced themselves hastily and reluctantly at the door now herd us around the bed and click their heels as we wait with bated breath, as the only sound that touches the room is the patient’s soft snores, as we swallow down on ideals of fight or flight, friend or foe.

                It’s the moment when Doctor Lehnsherr locks eyes with me and curls his nose up in preemptive irritation that I realize the peak of my medical career has probably already passed, those precious few moments about a minute ago when I walked into the door and the secretary nodded with a grin and was the first person to ever welcome me as a doctor. I try to swallow hard but I can’t and it sort of rolls downhill from there, especially when David and Goliath begin speaking at the same time.

                Though they kind of both seem like Goliath to me. I feel like David, except without the courage, or the strength. Or the wit. Or any sense of knowing how to survive a fatal situation.

                In short I know I’m doomed. I guess you could call me Doctor Doom. But I’d be too nervous to laugh.

                After sneering at each other for the other’s interruption, Dr. Lehnsherr cedes to Dr. Shaw, who smooths back his unnaturally shiny brown hair in triumph. “Well, look at all you bright young minds, nervous for your first day. No worries, Dr. Stethoscope-Up-My-Ass and I are here to help you ease into the transition of pubescent little medical students to full-fledged doctors. So if you have any questions, feel free to ask.”

                Shaw and Lehnsherr turn slowly to exchange a glance that’s an odd mix of the way a predator looks at its prey before it kills and the way two friends look across the classroom before giggling at a tacit joke. Within seconds their visceral laughter explodes throughout the room and for a moment I’m even hoping it’ll wake some of the patients out of their comas, but the way the two of them find solidarity in reprobate condescension makes any sense of hope dissipate quickly. Their hatred turns from each other and flows toward us, twofold.

                I’m going to hazard a guess that Dr. Shaw isn’t serious.

                The fake, wrinkled grin whips off his face and he snaps, “You, yes, ginger failing to hide herself behind the monitor, what is the number one cause of the ailment this young gentleman is facing here?” He gestures with glee at the patient resting in front of us. The room is so quiet you can hear drops of tears and sweat hit the ground from beneath the interns.

                Ginger Girl might just need treatment for a panic attack in a moment, and after a long, tense moment where she stares at the patient, mouth open in a silent scream, and then back at Shaw and then at all of us, desperate for help, in which we all perform cost-benefit analysis, considering the value of our own lives against hers, and our inherent doctoral disposition toward natural selection leaves us to keep our mouths shut, and most of us don’t know the answer anyway, Shaw moves onto the next quivering intern.

                “Fine. Spock, cowering in the corner. Can you compute an answer for us?”

                I can’t deny that it’s tempting to join in their cruel antics but my instinct is to point out to Shaw that we have names and feelings, but I bite my tongue, trying to give the boy with an embarrassingly Vulcan haircut a reassuring glance. But the fallout is assiduous.

                Shaw moves to the next intern and with each cruel nickname and snicker from Lehnsherr at his side I’m more tempted to blurt it out.

                The answer, I mean. Of course I know the answer. It’s rudimentary.

                And when someone finally hazards a guess—a stupid one, at that, of course it’s not heart murmur, so that wouldn’t be a logical cause—I lose it.

                “It’s hereditary, with a strong proclivity for children of parents with frequent fevers or asthma. And by ‘it’ I’m referring to atopic dermatitis, or eczema.” I take a breath, and then push on, the words flowing out with systemic ease, indoctrinated inside me so deep it’s second nature, but I’m still shocked at the nonchalance, at the arrogance, at my ability to face the two sadists staring agape at me. “He seems to have a more severe case that’s recently manifested itself, most likely by an external stimulation, such as extended exposure to chlorine. The rash is showing on his wrists, a common place of abrasion and a red flag for eczema.” I blink, breathe. “…sir,” I add, signing my own death warrant with a flourish.

                As the room falls silent despite those outside of this sphere of influence, this area of deathly quiet and potential and first impressions, I try to slow my heartbeat to the sound of the beeping monitor, the only sure sign that time hadn’t stopped.

                I’m looking for Shaw to fling himself across the bed and smite me where I stand, but it’s Dr. Lehnsherr who breaks first, like a live human sculpture suddenly breaking out of its mold and bursting to life, is face as rubbery and unpredictable as if it’s encased in wax.

                Raven manages to slip through two interns and grabs my hand, squeezing reassurances as we both wait for a shitstorm.

                “Oho, oh, Sebby, we’ve got one. We have got our new celebrity.” He claps his hand around Doctor “Sebby” Shaw’s back, and the ease with which he infuses every day movements with sarcasm makes my knees want to buckle.               

                And that was the first time I saw The Gesture, the flash of light before the impact of the bomb, the click of the trigger before the sight of the bullet. He wipes at his nose and folds his arms, tongue sizzling between his teeth as he warms up for the scorching words to come out of his mouth.

                I’m glad I learn The Gesture early on. It gives me solace I’ll at least know when to duck and cover.

                “Newbie,” he starts off slowly, making it all the more disconcerting that he doesn’t burst all at once. “Newbie, I don’t _care_ that your answer was, to my disappointment, quite correct. I don’t _care_ that you seem to think your father’s prestige will get you any brownie points as a future Girl Scout here. And I certainly don’t care that you were the most prestigious student at learning-to-be-a-doctor.com, because—”

                “Oxford,” I manage, my voice barely a whisper. The dig at my father had snapped something in me.

                He rolls his eyes. “Hogwarts, yes, that’s what I said, did I stutter? If you know what’s good for you, newbie, you’ll keep your pretty little lips shut and give the runts of the litter a chance before I kick you out of here faster than you can drink a cup of tea.”

                I swallow and a knife slips down my throat. All my years preparing to become a doctor, to make my father—my very recently dead father, which most people don’ t know—proud as I follow his steps, try and combat the disease that killed him…and here I am, my dreams being crushed in moments.

                And it’s in my remembrance of his stubborn resolve that I stand my ground, despite Raven’s hushed protests. “I’ll give everyone else a chance right after you decide to.”

                Shaw’s eyebrow raises to the ceiling with glee at my obstinacy toward Lehnsherr, and his stupid, wild black hair swept all over like he’d been here for hours doing something other than spit on dying children and their dreams, and his dumb, icy blue eyes that make him seem more like the Grim Reaper than a doctor with a good bedside manner.

                I’m suddenly imagining him in black robes with a sickle and a brief smile crosses my lips before I’m torn back into reality by someone’s uncomfortable cough. I lock eyes with Lehnsherr, with his dumb blue eyes, and something is in there that wasn’t before.

                That something, I would later learn, was respect.

                His nose draws up in his iconic sneer and he whirls away, a blur of unearned doctor’s coat whipping behind him, whacking into Shaw’s backside in what looks like an accident but even an idiot could see the enmity.

                It isn’t until Shaw lets us go to our designated areas—more so because he’s laughing so hard he can’t talk than out of mercy—that everyone finally takes a breath.

                Everyone claps me on the back, little Charlie the British kid, finally earned his balls.

                I’m still unnerved but I drop the subject with Raven as we head to the room we were assigned.

                Raven and I had befriended each other at the beginning of our pre-med years. While the way she carries herself matches the typical stereotype of a blonde-haired beautiful girl, she’s still a genius, and constantly raises my competitive standards. She makes me better and though she’d never admit it—I guess I never would, either—I make her better, too. I’m glad, though we parted ways through four years of medical school, we both ended up at Westchester Hospital, both on track to be doctors.

                For our first few weeks, we’re to be split up in pairs, different ones each day, working on the same patient together under close scrutiny of doctors like Lehnsherr, or Shaw, and helped by nurses. Apparently they’ve got nothing better to do except piss all over interns. I’m frustrated that we’re being so babied, but I swallow my pride and realize I’ll need the practice.

                And patience.

                Patients.

                “Charles, you’re doing that thing again,” Raven says, picking up the chart at the end of the patient’s bed.

                “What thing?” I pretend.

                “The thing where your eyes get this glazed over look and you share a joke with yourself or some creepy fantasy and you either end up laughing or looking off into space, disturbed.”

                I catch myself grinning and I know she’s right. I shake it off and draw up by her side. We’re not allowed to actually follow through on our decisions without Actual Doctor supervision, but we’re allowed to break down diagnosis and procedure step by step, playing off each other’s strengths and weaknesses, interacting with the patients.

                I lean over her shoulder, my breath blowing strands of hair into her face, and she brushes them back over her shoulder into my face, and so it goes on for a few seconds until we’re fighting like children over the chart, and we wake up the patient, a pallid middle-aged man who looks quite bemused but not amused.

                Language distinctions.

                “Hello, good morning—”

                “Afternoon,” I say with a grin, and Raven shoots me a ‘don’t-even-start-correcting-everything-I-say’ look, so I stop smiling and finally tear the chart from her grasp as I let her continue on.

                She clears her throat angrily, which you wouldn’t think you could do angrily, but I also didn’t think you could do that many things sarcastically, but as soon as Raven finishes coughing angrily and I reading his chart amusedly Lehnsherr comes bursting in and I’m pretty sure he’s breathing sardonically.

                Raven finally awakens her inner beast, smiling at him as venomously as he beams at the two of us. “Doctor Lehnsherr! Wow, it’s been five minutes since we’ve last seen you and you’re already to get back at it. Care to join us?”

                More sarcastic breathing. And I think that blink was ironic.          

                Wow, I’m diagnosing winks. I bury myself in my chart, eager to stay out of the limelight on this one. Lehnsherr and Raven exchange bitter remarks laden with feigned cheeriness while pretending to pay attention to the patient.

                “We should run some tests,” I blurt loudly, cutting across Dr. Lehnsherr. Oops.

                The Gesture flickers quickly across his features and he stretches back languidly on the patient’s bed, like he’s about to lay down on it, much to the patient’s discomfort, and I’m wondering if Lehnsherr does that often, and then this weird image of Dr. Lehnsherr laying in his pajamas with his patients and gossiping about different doctors is flipping in my head and Raven has to snap at me to tear me out of it.

                I get lost in my head a lot. I can’t imagine being schizophrenic, hearing all those voices in my head. A shudder runs down my spine and stops me from falling into that fantasy.

                “Newbie,” he begins, the pain of my general existence already rolling into his voice. “Now, I know you’ve got this fetish for jumping into everyone’s conversations, but if you would please—”

                “We only met five minutes ago, I think it’s a bit weird you already know my fetishes.” Oops. Wait. “I mean, not that interrupting people is a fetish. I can’t imagine a situation in where that could be sexualized, and…I mean…” Stop, stop!

                Lehnsherr whips his head about the room like he’s looking for the nearest noose to leap into. “Dear _God,_ don’t include Barbie and I in your sexual fantasies—yes, girlie, you’re Barbie—and just shut your mouth. Ew. Ew.” He leaps up and down on the balls of his feet, fake crying.

                The future of my doctoral career suddenly flashes before my eyes and the fact that this is indeed a reality makes my jaw snap shut.

                I would later learn he has a lot of voices, but Lehnsherr’s next voice is that of a mother talking to a baby, or apparently that of a little girl talking to a dog, when he says, “Good boy, Newbie! Oh, his training is coming along just swell, don’t you think, Mr. Powell?” He finally looks at the patient, who finally realizes the same time as me that we’ve just walked into a war zone.

                He manages a nod.

                Lehnsherr suddenly leaps off the bed and throws his arm around my shoulder, clipboard slicing into my forearm as he reaches and throws Raven into a headlock, too, and we’re in this uncomfortable blend of a sadistic hug and an intimate wrestling move and it’s like we’re posing for the cover of Abusive and Dysfunctional Families Weekly, and it’s only then that I fully realize what I’ve just gotten into.

                If you're wondering if it's an Abusive and Dysfunctional Family, you're not wrong.

               “Oh, what a fun three years this’ll be, kiddos,” Lehnsherr says, and I finally, completely, let my knees give out, overwhelmed, and right before I feel the metal edge of the bed connect with my skull and my world goes black, I realize I wouldn’t have fallen had he not let go.

                What a bastard.

                A bastard-coated bastard with bastard filling.


	2. Chapter 2

A week after Dr. Lehnsherr let me down—literally—for the first of many, we’re back at rounds again, and Raven continues to trump us all, leaving me dumbfound at her sudden confidence and, well, superiority.

                “And, Ms. Darkhome, since you’re doing so…adequately, why don’t you answer this next one? What ails young Mr. Jacobs here?”

                Like the rest of us, she’s already been scrutinizing him for a few minutes, but unlike the rest of us, she reaches a conclusion unnaturally quickly and leaves us eating her metaphorical dust.

                I find myself absently wiping my tongue to get the figurative sting of allegorical dust out of my mouth when Dr. Lehnsherr slides up beside me and drawls, “Drooling again, newbie?” I leap so high I fear I’ll hit the ceiling and knock myself out again but I manage to steady myself and spin on my heels, drawing away from the sound of Shaw yelling at a crying intern.

                “Not dirt, it’s a metaph—never mind. What can I help you with?”

                He rolls his eyes, shaking his head violently back in forth in vexation and I prepare for the onslaught but he finally stills himself and insists that he is, in fact, helping me and my pathetic ass and such, blah, blah blah, blah…I’m more interested in the clump of black hair that slipped onto his forehead during his hurricane fury of movement.

                The clump of black hair indicating he hasn’t showered in a bit, and even as a rather unorthodox doctor he seems like he’d be on top of hygiene, so why the lack of a shower?

                The revelation tugs a widespread grin onto my face.

                Damn, why couldn’t I think this way around patients for diagnosis? How is Raven beating the Oxford-borne doctor? I should be crushing her with my Holmesian deductions.

                “Sherlock!”

                I snap myself to attention, looking up at the looming tower of fury above me. “Sherlock?” I repeat.

                “Shir- _ley._ As in, a female. Which you are. Anyway—”

                “Have you been at this hospital working overtime? When’s the last time you were home?” I say. Lehnsherr narrows his eyes at me. I press on. “Oh, I get it. You don’t want people to think you’re nice, or that you care, or that you have a soul.” Still questioning that part. “I assure you, Doctor Lehnsherr, it’s quite alright for people to know that you…”

                I trail off as he stalks off, only to return seconds later out of thin air holding a pile of charts. “Well, newbie, you just bought yourself my entire weekend’s worth of patients, and the only thing I _care_ about is that everyone’s in tip-top shape when I’m back Monday morning.” He shoots me a wicked grin and whips out his cell phone as Shaw berates another intern. I can practically hear Raven biting her tongue.

                “Hello, yes, Emma dear, that new intern I was telling you about—” oh my _God,_ he talks about  me to other people, he does like me!—“just offered to cover all my shifts this weekend, even being on call tonight!” His saccharine smile gleams with venom. “Oh, I know, she’s a great gal. Anyway, what do you say you get down here from your board meeting and we go out to dinner someplace nice?”

                A great gal? I mouth, ‘me?’ to Dr. Lehnsherr, but he’s too busy laughing somewhat mirthlessly into the phone. “Oh, God, it’s painful even pretending. Yes, Emma, we can just have cold-hearted sex on the living room floor. But hurry up, before Shaw infects someone with his satanic disease and leaves me to treat them.”

                He tears the phone away from his ear, murmuring something as he slips it into his pocket. I’m vaguely aware I witnessed something disturbing, but everything’s relative and when he shoots me a glare I realize nothing is disturbing compared to the way his eyes make my knees shake, my spine crawl, but maybe it’s something else…

                “Get going, Jane, unlike your sex life, or lack thereof, which requires you to do everything yourself, these patients don’t cure themselves.” He whistles loudly and I tear across the room, foot catching on a stretcher and sending me into someone.

                “Oof, terribly sorry, mate.” I pull myself away and find myself craning my neck to look into the face of a janitor. Or, rather, _the_ Janitor.

                He neither glares at me nor smiles, just narrow his eyes as if he’s diagnosing me. “Why are you in such a hurry?” He leans on his mop, and I hope he’s trying to be kind.

                “Oh, um, I’ve just got loads of patients to deal with over the weekend. And tonight I’m on call, so that’ll take up some of my time.” He continues to stare, assessing me. I misjudge. “Being on call means I need to be prepared for emergencies, so I can’t always be attending to my own patients.”

                He straightens up, and now he glares. “What, you think I don’t know that because I’m a janitor? Think that my five years working here before you doesn’t mean anything, bub?”

                Dammit, Xavier! “No, I-I…er…”

                “You’ve made an enemy today.”

                I start to blurt out some confused response to ensure tranquility between us but my tongue gets stuck and I’m left charging back in the direction I came, quickly trying to plot a course away from Lehnsherr.

                But there he is, clipboard in hand, legs staggered, bracing for my impact, or rather the impact of the clipboard against my skull, and I lean back on my heels and skid to a sloppy halt before reeling to my right, struggling to remember in which direction the ICU is so I can start attending to my first patient.

                After ten minutes of wandering and trying to subdue the whiplash from my scurrying, I still haven’t found the ICU but I’ve happened across one of my—Lehnsherr’s—patients.

                “Mrs. Dalton! Hello, I’m Doctor Xavier, and I’ll be your…your doctor. I’m  a doctor. Well, I’m an intern. An intern doctor.” I need to get this whole thinking-before-speaking thing down. I try to feign cheeriness even though I’ve got to tell her she’s in for a brutal night due to food poisoning. She smiles, amused at my nervous antics, and it’s hard to swallow and push through telling her some bad news.

                She takes the whole food poisoning thing pretty well, most likely because I mitigated it in its entirety, which we were warned against doing in med school, but here I am. Guilt builds up in my chest and I’m unsure of what else to do so I reassure her and send a nurse to find Lehnsherr so he can prescribe the necessary treatment. I sure as hell am not waiting around for him to sneak up behind me and yell like if he ever stops he’ll die.

                I dip and dodge around the hallway for the next hour, exhausted from diagnosing patients only to leave them waiting for concrete information, which is when I explain the whole intern thing and continue to send nurses to find other residents to finalize my choices because I can’t. Then I do what I like to call the Grin and Spin, which is shoot them one of my devilishly good looks (my mom used to say that about me, for the record) and then whip around on my heels and out the room.

                But my lack of experience with the general layout with the building—the general being a doctor thing—and the desire to hide and avoid at least three people leaves me more flustered and tired than I’ve been in a long while.

                “Who are you hiding from?”

                I leap at least ten feet in my air like I’m a cat, and once I register it isn’t Lehnsherr or the Janitor or Shaw leering behind me, I find myself wondering what the perks of being a feline doctor would be. It’d be less sanitary, sure, but the deftness with which one could move about the hallways might minimize imminent threats.

                “Charles? Hello?”

                I draw myself away from peering around the corner from which I was ensuring the janitor’s absence and turn to face Hank, my best friend from med school. “Hank! God, I haven’t seen you since rounds. What’ve you been up to?”

                Hank pushes his glasses up onto the bridge of his nose as he rolls his eyes, creating the illusion his eyes are bugging out of his skull. I blink to make sure I’m not imagining something. Again. “Some arrogant resident douche has been breathing down my neck, like he’s waiting for me to screw up. Like I didn’t graduate salutatorian of my class. You know, second.” He shoots me a grin half-laced with bitterness. He’ll take his envy over me beating him out for top of the class to his grave. “And Christ, is that Lehnsherr guy a jerk or what? I don’t see him much but when I do I feel the constant need to punch him in the throat.”

                I nod to corroborate the violent urges toward our dictatorial superior. He’s got the German accent, if only he had the handlebar mustache…

                “Charles? How are things going for you?”

                I ruffle my hair, thinking carefully in case someone’s got spies around me. I glare at the nurse leaning against the wall a couple feet away from us, and she glares back, sticking her middle finger up and stalking away. Oops.

                “Er, well…yeah, pretty rough. The janitor seems to hate me for some reason. And Shaw freaks me out. And Lehnsherr has been breathing down my neck this entire week, and dumped all his patients on me for the weekend so he can screw his angry, detached ex-wife, apparently. Weird shit. Anyway, I better get going. I can’t stay in one place for too long or they might find me.”

                Hank’s a surgical intern, so he doesn’t really have any patients, but he nods like he understands and we go our separate ways after exchanging our secret handshake we never dropped after all this time. Seeing him for the first time in a week for real, besides exchanging funny faces in the hallways or sitting down for the five minutes we had allotted for lunch with all our internship stuff keeping us busy, gives me a boost in my step so when I turn the corner and slam into yet another person, I’m still grinning like a fool. Like I’ve been branded the village idiot just for daring to smile in what must surely be a bitter and cold place.

                I find myself eye to eye with an incredibly attractive blonde woman, devoid of scrubs, wearing a slim-fitted blazer, not a single drop of patients’ spit or urine or sweat on her, not a single intimation as to her position as a doctor written on her. She smiles down on me with a sharp flash of teeth and I’m left staring into her piercing blue eyes, willing myself not to rake my eyes up and down her body like I’m dying to.

                Alright, so I swing both ways. Have you seen some of these women? You would, too.

                “So sorry,” I blurt, knowing I should move out of the way before I do something even more stupid, which is inevitable, but I’m magnetized to the ground. She’s more intimidating than she is attractive but it’s enough to keep me staring.

                “No worries. The idiot morgue guy down the hall ran into me with a body bag, and now I smell like imbecile and posthumous hospital failures.” She laughs mirthlessly, and I spot The Janitor mopping down the hallway, moving ominously in my direction. I cast a look over my shoulder and spot Lehnsherr stalking up the hallway, teeth bared, eyes glaring directly at me.

                My first experience with triage. Scary lady, scary doctor, or scary janitor?             

                “Sorry!” I shout, shoving past the scary lady and flinging myself gracelessly into the supply closet that Raven had informed me yesterday is the communal mental breakdown area for interns. I rear back on my heels and slam the door into place behind me, chest heaving with anxiety. Someone pounds on the door in unison with my throbbing heart and I prepare for the aspersion from any three of the beasts past the door.

                But the door burst open and I’m flung onto my knees, crawling desperately to the corner of the supply closet, arming myself with a syringe as I spin on my knees to face one of the monsters, or worse: all three.

                “Please, Cerberus, don’t hurt me!”

                I always wanted a Greek allusion to be my last words. Maybe then I’ll get free passage along the River Styx and move right up to Olympus. I’d like to sit among Zeus, or maybe next to Poseidon…

                “Intern!” I snap my head up. The figure looming above me isn’t a three-headed monster armed with a metal clipboard or a mop but the woman from outside, who looks more amused than anything. I take the crooked smirk on her face as proof that she’s at least mildly human and my heartbeat slows for a minute, and I’m able to swallow. “Just you and a syringe against the rest of the world, huh?”

                “W-well, I…in retrospect, probably not the most appropriate weapon, but…”

                “Oh, you’re simply adorable. I could eat you.” She bites down on the air in front of her and winks and I’m only just starting to catch on to what’s going on when the door clicks shut behind her, the swipes of the Janitor’s mop and vicious aura of Dr. Lehnsherr left to the world outside the closet.

                “I’m gay,” I blurt, starting up onto my feet, but she shoves me back down onto my knees.

                “Please. Like I didn’t notice the way you were eyeing me out there.”

                Dammit, Xavier.

                She leans down, grabs the hairs at the nape of my neck, and drags me in for a rather violent kiss. You would never think a kiss could be violent, but here I am. I imagine this is what Dr. Lehnsherr kisses like. Not that I’m wondering…he and this lady should meet up some time. They could violent kiss forever. But the idea doesn’t give me much pleasure.

                She bites my lip as she digs up my shirt and presses her cold hands onto my chest and I’m suddenly very acutely aware of my own boyish figure and her extremely womanly figure, and you could call me a weak pig for falling so easily into a seductive trap but hey, I needed the stress-reliever, and damn was it nice.

                Just as I start to wonder whether she’s into the whole cuddling business—I am, of course—she stands to her feet, pulls on her heels, and steps on me and then over me to pick up the blazer she’d ripped off because I was “taking too long.”

                As I’m rubbing the heel-shaped indent on my chest, she says, “Good enough. Thanks, kid. I give you a week.”

                And then she whips out of the closet as quickly as she came in. I’m pulling on my shirt and pants when the door flies back open and I have mere seconds to pray it’s the lesser of two evils, but God isn’t on my side.

                “If that’s you, newbie, I swear to—oh, oh my God. What the hell were you doing in here?”

                I glance down at my half-pulled up pants, the iridescent shining of my pale stomach where I hadn’t pulled my shirt down all the way, and feel a curl of hair fall down from its carefully moussed position.

                Then I look back up at Lehnsherr.

                “Were you—”

                “Self-examining for possible signs of external infection? Absolutely.” Hell yes, Xavier. Good doctors think on their feet. Why does he still look so disturbed? What’s with that gleam in his eyes?

                “Get up, get the hell up. You gave Miss Jacobson the wrong amount of Percocet, dumbass. I thought you were supposed to be the smart one.”

                I straighten up quickly to my feet, grin already halfway onto my face. “Oh yeah? Who told you?” He thinks I’m supposed to be smart!

                He slaps me in the shoulder with his clipboard, the grin flying off my face. “Someone even stupider than you. Get out, Lily, go fix your mistake before you kill someone. Go!”

                I slip past him, careful not to even brush the edges of his cape, and charge down to the nurse’s station, the sentence spilling over my lips. I won’t have a patient die on my hands.

                Not like someone did to Dad.

                I shake it off and repeat my sentence carefully, dictating the exact amount of milligrams, eyes skimming over the chart to pick up any information, anything to amalgamate into the consummate diagnosis, the perfect amount to heal her.

                The head nurse, Moira, smiles at me. “Good catch, Charles. I’ll get right on it.”

                I let out a huff of relief, and suck it quickly back in to sustain myself. A heavy presence weighs behind me, and I turn to face Lehnsherr, who’s features are tugged into an expression I can’t diagnose, something like amusement or confusion or something in between, and I feel uncomfortable in a way I hadn’t yet around him.

                I pat down my disheveled hair, heat rising in my cheeks as I can only imagine what it looks like after that woman wrung her hands through it. Goddamn. I didn’t even learn her name. Xavier, you slut!

                I make it a mission to find her, and I scan the area, but not before Lehnsherr comes up and slams his chart into my chest, knocking me into the counter, my back pressing into a precarious stack of files. He plants a hand on either side of me onto the counter, eyes narrowed, and I try to shrink further back, try to ignore the urge to pull in toward him, to look through the harsh glint into his eyes and see something a bit more…human. Less mutant, less detached and monstrous.

                “Adequate,” he says, trying the word out. He waggles his tongue like it stung him to admit that. “Adequate, so far. Don’t screw up.”

                I want to point out that I can’t really, not with him breathing down my neck all the time, but then I remember that I’ve been avoiding him and a janitor, for God’s sake, and the only time I’d gotten away from him I’d had pathetic weird sex with some woman who might’ve been a patient and never even bothered to ask her name.

                I’m trying to figure out how to push Lehnsherr away from me while also hinting that I find it oddly amusing that he’s got me pinned against a counter, oddly pleasing, like he’s giving me special attention, like I’m his protégé, like I’m his…

                “My ex-wife!” he suddenly blurts, peeling away from me. “Where is that godforsaken five feet and eight inches of unadulterated hell? Has anyone seen her?”

                I rub the back of my neck, trying to disperse the heat from my cheeks into the rest of my body, especially into my trembling hands. Most people mumble, unsure of seeing her.

                “I’m right here, you pig. Ready to go? I’ve been looking for you forever.”

                I duck behind a bunch of charts, trying to sneak a look at Dr. Lehnsherr’s ex-wife. Wild images burst through my head: a vampire with gratuitously long fangs, a bat-lady with high-pitched echolocation screeches…but out of fear of Lehnsherr yelling at me or calling me a degrading girl’s name, I keep my head low.

                “Where’s the poor sucker you shit your weekend’s work all over? He at least deserves a thanks, Erik,” she says. I’m about to take that as an opportunity to introduce myself but Lehnsherr speaks again.

                “I think the best thanks he can get from you is not having to encounter you at all, darling.”

                More dissent. A clatter of footsteps. The cold metal of the clipboard flying out of my hands, my eyes shut out of fear that maybe if I make eye contact with Mrs. Ex-Lehnsherr, I might just turn to stone.

                “Newbie, can you act socially acclimated for at least thirty seconds? Emma here wants to pretend to be grateful for the fact that you’re taking all the weekend shifts so that when she ends up burning in the eternal inferno that is hell she hopes she’ll at least be excused from the seventh circle.” I slowly start to open my eyes.

                “Emma, meet Newbie. Newbie, meet Emma.”

                As a doctor you have to be good at predicting and while I try to lie to myself by the time my eyes are half open her figure is already ensconced on the back of my eyelids.

                It doesn’t stop the moan that escapes my lips, or the cackle that emits from her.

                “Oh, boy, this’ll make headline news.”

                Scary Lady winks at me, nods at Lehnsherr, and shakes her head fervently as he grins icily at me, forever ignorant in his narcissistic world.

                You screwed his ex-wife and in turn you screwed yourself.

                Dammit, Xavier.


	3. Chapter 3

I haven’t slept in three nights and I’ve barely eaten anything. I guess that’s a testament to how afraid I am of Doctor Lehnsherr, and how afraid I am of when Emma’s going to drop the bomb.

                Granted, she hasn’t, yet. It’s becoming increasingly hard to keep it secret myself. I have this inherent guilt complex going on, you see. Guilty even in a hospital where I’m helping people.

                “Newbie, where’s the chart I set down here five seconds ago?”

                “Oops, sorry. I picked it up. My bad. But I promise, I wasn’t trying to take it away from you. I wasn’t cheating on you with it. Not that I would, you know, with a chart…”

                Or in the bathroom.

                “Jillian, for God’s sake, I can’t piss with your pasty white skin glowing against the tile, I can’t tell where you end and the urinal starts. Also, aren’t you in the wrong bathroom? This is the men’s.”

                “Good one, Doctor Lehnsherr. I’m not in the wrong bathroom, of course, I would never be in the wrong place at the wrong time. No, sir. Nor would my good friend down here ever be where he’s not supposed to be, if you understand what I mean.”

                Even the cafeteria isn’t safe.

                “Did you ask _Shaw_ to clear your prescription for Mr. Hudson, instead of me? Are you trying to hide something, Paulina?”

                “Absolutely not. I have nothing to hide from you, I…I just—”

                “Give me your seat and I’ll be merciful.”

                As I skid down the hallway, shoving the rest of my lunch down my throat and dance past stretchers and wheelchairs to get down the hall, I consider making a deal with the devil.

                And by the devil, I mean Emma.

                Oh, God, I’m starting to think like Lehnsherr.

                She’d said his name was Erik. As I check out my patient who’s recently deaf from a construction accent, I try the name out, let it roll off my tongue. “Erik,” I say, timid at first. I shoot a glance over my shoulder. “Erik.” It comes out lighter. I snap it out, as angrily as he spews out feminine names at me. “Erik!” What a nice, angry German name. It suits him, I think. I should try it out.

                War flashbacks to high school in which I got wedgies and swirlies every day.

                I decide against it. Maybe when we become friends I’ll try it out.

                “What are you saying?!” my patient screams.

                “Nothing, sorry,” I reassure him. He glares back. Oh. I wave it off and wink, but I think he takes it wrong, so I slide quickly out of there, foregoing the Grin and Spin.

                The rest of the week goes fairly smoothly, and I even started to lose some anxiety and catch up on sleep from working Doctor Lehnsherr’s shifts over the weekend. He owes me one, that bastard. Maybe it’s enough to get me out of the whole sleeping-with-his-ex-wife thing…

                In fact, the week is going so well that by Friday, I’m waiting for someone to come along and screw it all up.

                That person, it turns out, is me.

                Hank and I have a long running pact to share all of our sexual endeavors, ever since he managed to get laid a lot in med school somehow, and I had to put up with getting locked out of our dorm room, and he felt so bad that he’d at least tell me about it so I could live vicariously through his lifestyle.

                I held out for this long. It just kind of flew out of my mouth.

                Now, I’m not an idiot. I didn’t use her name, or explain her relation to Doctor Lehnsherr, but I hadn’t really considered the fact that awkward supply closet sex is in fact a rarity and might just set up a red flag for possible culprits.

                “So, right as I was showing her my favorite yoga pose—”

                “The one…the tree one?”

                “Yeah, that one. Anyway, right as I was doing that very seductive pose, you know, you’ve seen it, well, then she—”

                Hank recoils all of a sudden and I can almost feel the gun on the back of my neck and hear the click of the trigger.

                “Do you brag about all your sexual failures, intern, or is this the first?” Emma slams down into the chair next to me and I feel the flames come out of her nose and lick my face.

                “I wish I were a dragon,” I tell her, and she rears back and knocks me in the forehead with hers, and I fly backward, skidding into Lehnsherr’s steel-toed boots.

                I’m just kidding. They’re sneakers. I like to dramatize sometimes.

                He lifts me up by the collar of my scrubs, like I’m his little boy that’s just stolen a cookie from the cookie jar. I start to whisper about how I’d like a cookie right now as my forehead echoes my heartbeat, throbbing, but he clamps my lips shut with his long fingers. Heat races down my spine.

                “What the hell did you do to make her so mad? Congratulations. And Emma, dear, nice hit.”

                “Thank you, Erik. We had sex.”

                Lehnsherr snaps away from glaring at me and turns to Emma, hands still over my mouth. “Yes, we have had sex.”

                “No, jackass. I screwed your little protégé.”

                In an appalling turn of events my euphoria swallows my dread whole and I whip away from Lehnsherr, screaming, “I’m your protégé! I knew it! You do like me, even the She-Devil sees it!” I turn to Hank, who gives me a hard high five, then slips back into worried glance.

                I spin around.

                Ah, to die in a hospital, the most circuitous irony one could ask for.

                But there’s a time to be ironic, and a time to be genuine. Lehnsherr doesn’t look angry, livid, murderous—all the things I’d imagined him to be when he found out. He looks oddly disappointed in me, and I feel heavy, rather than afraid. He does the Frown and Turn Around, a depressing inversion of my Spin and Grin, and his large presence slips out of the cafeteria, leaving it feeling empty and quiet.

                I turn to Emma, starting to apologize.

                “Oh, honey, I’m not looking for an apology. I’ve been waiting to stick it to Erik for a long time. I quite enjoyed it, though you were a bit pathetic.”

                She does the Smirk and Leave, which doesn’t even rhyme to my dismay, and leaves as quickly as she’d come and destroyed everything.

                The next week is miserable. I hadn’t even considered Lehnsherr being disappointed in me. I’d practiced taking a punch from Hank, and I had even managed not to cry. I’d prepared for listening to an onslaught of insults by listening to Raven’s latest blunder with her boyfriend for two hours on the phone. I’d even furtively siphoned some of Lehnsherr’s patients into my own schedule, so when he dumped them all on me I would already have been taking care of them.

                But the silence, the leaving the room as soon as I enter, taking my favorite patients away from me, the lack of insults…

                Yesterday he even walked in on me calling myself girl names in the bathroom mirror, flicked his nose and glared, and I had a moment of hope that he’d yell at me, but he backed out and left me whispering, “You’re pathetic, Laura, really.”

                I manage to catch him at the nurse’s station, where he’s going off on Raven for spending too much time on one of her patients.

                The solemn tone is already set in my voice. “Doctor Lehnsherr.”

                “Listen, Barbie, I know your love life is lacking and picking up sick and desperate old men in a hospital are easy pickings, but you should—”

                Being a doctor takes a lot of courage. Unconventional courage. There’s walking into an arena to fight to the death courage, and there’s bringing a patient back from the brink of death courage. But being a human takes a lot of courage, too.

                I swallow a deep breath and step between an anxiety-ridden Raven and a fuming Lehnsherr.

                “Doctor Lehnsherr, please,” I say, fighting to keep my voice steady. “Doctor Lehnsherr, I’m really sorry. I’m an idiot. I had no idea who she was, for the record, but I’m still an idiot and I’m still sorry. I understand if this impedes on our friendship—”

                The Gesture glares across his face, and I realize that was a bit bold, and I push ahead in one breath before he decapitates me.

                “But I’m really sorry and I would appreciate it if this incident didn’t ruin our professional relationship, because I would like to work together to help our patients rather than have them suffer because our lack of partnership as doctors.”

                I slam my eyes shut, because I read somewhere that pain is less painful when you don’t see when it’s coming. But there’s nothing. And I open my eyes, and he’s scrawling something down on one of his charts.

                “Okay,” he says.

                Okay? Holy shit, okay is amazing. Okay!

                “Okay,” he says again. “Honestly, Georgia, it’s not even that I’m angry, I’m just coming out of shock from the idea that you actually have a penis. And I’m not going to hit you. I don’t hit girls, it’s a rule.”

                There it is. I grin from ear to ear and slap my arms around myself to refrain from hugging him. Home free. I sweep around Raven, who’s standing there in stunned silence, do a celebratory kick in midair, slip onto one foot, the other jamming into a mop bucket, and find myself pushed down the hallway by a mysterious outside force, stopping only once I collide with a shelf of medical gloves, drowning in a sea of horror and latex.

                The glove resting directly on my eyes gets whipped off, and Lehnsherr and the Janitor lean over me, their grins putting the Grinch’s to shame. “But I’m not above conspiring with the janitorial staff to knock you off your knobby little legs, though, newbie. Besides, it was more fun psychologically torturing you for a week. Please, like I care you and Emma went at it together. She’s my _ex_ -wife, dumbass, I sleep with her less than you sleep with your mom.”

                That was one time. One time. There was a spider in my bed, for God’s sake.

                Their faces fade away into the white light, and I’m blinking tears of agony and relief back into my eyes, a shaken grin managing to split my face.

                _Protégé._

                I think he likes me.

                He even knows I have a penis.

***

                The week progresses slower than the girl names fly over Lehnsherr’s lips and I feel like I’ve got as many patients as I have female double identities.

                “Ladasha,” Lehnsherr starts in a pained voice, and I start to open my mouth and he gives me a death stare, so I snap my lips shut. “Yes, I’m trying to be more politically correct. Do you prefer Olga? That’s Russian. Anyway, why in God’s name did you even consider a surgical consult for Mr. Laudenson? He needs medication, not an indelible scar as a reminder of not just your incompetency but your idiot surgeon friend—”

                “Hank?” I say, excited that he’s recognized that I do, in fact, have friends.

                “Yes, Pillsbury Doughboy, or whatever. I can’t believe you actually managed to find someone with pastier skin than you. Would you just go and fix your mistake right now before you kill someone?”

                I grab the chart from him, shooting him a sly smirk. “Well, as you may know, sir, I am in fact—”

                “The only intern chimpanzee with half a brain to not kick a bucket over on behalf of one of her patients? Yes, I’m well aware. And I am, of course. Waiting. It will happen, and it will crush you. Move along, Malala.”

                Something weighs on me and I can’t bring myself to tear away. Lehnsherr bends over his chart on the counter at the nurse’s station, pretending not to listen to Moira’s sob story. But anyone—maybe not anyone, maybe just me—can see the way his eyes flick over the same sentence again and again, the way his pen dances in his fingertips without actually writing anything, because he’s listening, and he’s always listening, because he cares.

                And then my heart’s caught in my throat, because I care, too. And I don’t want to kill someone. There are murders and there are accidental deaths and one of the two of them are a result of incompetency and one of those is much more likely to occur by a doctor’s hands than the other. A cascade of fear and a revelation of the profundity of my job crashes down.

                “Newbie, why are you still standing there? Have your skinny white legs finally failed you?”

                My mind races through the mistakes I’ve made. The leaking IV for Mrs. Dunbar. The excessive amounts of Percocet for that other guy. The fact that I could’ve killed him and I don’t even know his name. And Lehsnherr was there; he was always there, even though he pretended he wasn’t, trying to hide his lean frame behind doors and shelves, always veiling his caring disposition in a façade of anger and apathy.

                He shoots me a glare, a final chance, and continues his conversation with Moira, spewing a stream of surprisingly kind advice. He finishes, snaps his untouched chart shut, and whirls on me.

                “Now, I know you get paid an appallingly small—yet barely appropriate considering your competency –salary, but I might just have to suggest to the hospital board to pay you zilch, nada, niet, nothing if you continue to stand there slack-jawed and puppy-eyed like—”

                Maybe he’s got a thing for puppy-eyes. Maybe his conversation with Moira, whom I suspect is an old sweetheart, has lightened his dark heart. Maybe he gets a bonus if he meets his one-kind-act-of-the-month quota. But he trails off, locking eyes with me. I know he means to calm me but my heart starts to pound because of a different kind of anxiety, and my palms sweat as I clamp them together.

                His cool eyes pierce mine as he opens his mouth, but I interrupt him.

                “I don’t want to kill anyone,” I say. A nervous intern charges past me and in typical hospital manner as my steady and safe life comes crashing down, the world keeps spinning and the intern slams into me, and I’m stopped only by a strong hand on my shoulder pulling me back.

                He keeps his hand there long after I steady myself.

                “You make it sound like it’s murder. It’s not. Sure, you idiots would kill half the human population if I weren’t around, but here’s the good news: I am. I’m always around. Literally. I’m always in this godforsaken hellhole.” He smiles to himself, but then glances up and I get that he’s sharing it with me. I swallow, dropping my gaze. “Hey.” I look up. “It’s pretty damn impressive that it’s been five weeks and you haven’t killed anyone yet. You also catch your mistakes more than other interns, and you’re humble about it.”

                I take a shaky breath and manage a grin. I think he’s trying to say that he might just be proud of—

                “Now, I’m not going to lie, while you beat me with the whole humility thing, I, in fact, went three months without making a mistake. And technically, when Mrs. Jackson did die, I was on call, and no one bothered to cover for me. So we might just waive that accolade to more than three months.” Now his grin is back to its sharp, arrogant crescent, and I’m shaking my head, managing a small smile as he swaggers away, screaming at an intern to give him a high five for the accomplishments of his past-intern self.

                But the smile slips off of my face as soon as he leaves the room, and I’m left with one thought nagging at the back of my head.

                He’s worked here nine years, yet he still remembers her name. The woman he neglected and let die. This thought haunts me, but not as much as another thought:

                If the thought of it haunts me, I wonder how much she still haunts him.


End file.
